This is a book-lover's book about food: about taste, smell, touch, appetite, and all the pleasures of the table. It features 77 poems and prose pieces by some of the world's finest writers, from Basho to Betty Fussell, Colette to Calvin Trillin - all selected and complemented with illustrations by artist/anthologist Bascove, the creator of the best-selling Where Books Fall Open. The witty selections are complemented by fifteen full-color paintings by the editor, paintings whose "gently voluptuous figuration [is] beautiful...Their most deeply felt quality is a kind of animating tendresse all too rare today" (Gerrit Henry, Art in America). Beautifully conceived and lovingly produced, here is the perfect book for the most discriminating literary gourmet on your holiday gift list.

Some of the authors represented in Sustenance and Desire: Diane Ackerman · Roy Blount Jr. · Anne Caston · Lucille Clifton · Billy Collins · Robertson Davies · Michael Dorris · M.F.K. Fisher · Betty Fussell · Allen Ginsberg · Donald Hall · Jane HirschWeld · Langston Hughes · Jane Kenyon · Barbara Kingsolver · Maxine Kumin · Stanley Kunitz · Jhumpa Lahiri · Primo Levi · Audre Lourde · Elizabeth Macklin · Czeslaw Milosz · Vladimir Nabokov Pablo Neruda · Joyce Carol Oates · Mary Oliver · Marcel Proust · May Sarton · James Seay · Diane Wakoski · Derek Walcott · Richard Wilbur